


A CAT OF A DIFFERENT COAT

by cailures



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 02:36:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20350978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cailures/pseuds/cailures
Summary: JAIME AND CERSEI ESCAPE. THAT'S IT. THAT'S THE FIC.





	A CAT OF A DIFFERENT COAT

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #12

Cersei had never quite felt fear like this before. 

She'd experienced shades of it before, of course. Fear had shaped much of who, and what, she had become. Her fears revealed what she valued, and she'd committed horrendously violent atrocities to achieve and preserve what she valued. She had loved and she had feared but never had she experienced the pure, nauseating terror that consumed her now. 

With one hand pressed to the wall guiding her descent, and the other arm wrapped protectively around her stomach, she stumbled down the crumbling staircase in a daze. There was nowhere left to hide, her guards and protectors were gone, and her brothers had abandoned and betrayed her. Her heart palpitated at the sudden thought of Jaime. He was the only man she ever loved, the one who came into this world with her, then left her alone to die. Was he even alive, now? She considered, for a moment, that he was, and felt a lump lurch painfully into her throat. Immediately, she pushed him out of her mind. 

"My baby must live," she said, "I won't lose another child. I won't."

Nearby, the dragon shrieked a terrifying cry before blasting the castle walls with another incendiary attack. The ground shook violently, rattling Cersei to her bones. She reached the end of the staircase and without looking back, stumbled deeper into the keep.

***

She managed to safely navigate to the dungeons, yet felt no sense of relief. Her body could no longer push on, and she clumsily lowered herself onto her hands and knees before collapsing onto her side. She breathed deeply and raggedly, choking and sputtering on the ash and dust lingering thickly in the air, and then spat the taste from her mouth, noting the spackles of bright red blood accumulating underneath her.

How could it come to this? After everything she’d sacrificed, she was to die, alone and powerless, cowering in her own dungeon? At least, she considered, this death was a private death. There was no one to pity her, and yet, no one to miss her. Another eruption slammed into the castle, splintering the thick rocks of the dungeon walls.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her baby. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you,” and after a moment’s pause, “I couldn’t protect any of you.” She closed her eyes.

***

“Cersei!”

She heard the muffled echo of a shout and opened her eyes to look around. Her eyes locked on a bloody and wounded man slumped heavily against the staircase. Her eyes widened and her jaw fell slack.

“Jaime...?” she managed, almost breathlessly.

He stared back at her, his chest heaving for air. With their eyes locked, she raised herself to her knees and he, with a loud grunt of effort, pushed himself to move to her. Without hesitation, without a moment’s thought between them of all the betrayals and lies and infidelities, they threw their arms around each other and embraced. In that moment, they were home. Nothing else in this world mattered.

Except that the home that they _lived_ in was both crumbling and on fire, another uncomfortably close cave-in reminded Jaime, and they could not remain here and hope to live. 

“You’re hurt,” Cersei said softly, her fingers gingerly examining the bloody gashes and stains on his shirt.

“It doesn’t matter,” he dismissed, with a renewed sense of urgency. “We need to go. Back the way I came. I have a way.”

“What are you talking about, the Targaryen girl ha--”

“We can _survive_, our _baby_ can survive, but you need to trust me and we need to go _now_.”

***

The pair staggered together out of the castle and onto the sun-warm sands of the beach. They hadn’t made it more than a dozen paces towards the water when the entrance suddenly collapsed in on itself with a thunderous finality. Cersei glanced back one last time at the walls that had protected her for so long, the place where she had lost so much more than she could ever get back. 

“Come,” encouraged Jaime, knowing exactly which anguished memories her mind was revisiting. “We’re almost there. There’s a boat waiting for us.”

Too exhausted to ask how this was possible, how _any_ of this was possible, she nodded in understanding, and they pressed on. 

Before they had quite reached the shoreline, Cersei stopped abruptly. Jaime noticed and turned back to see her staring at Euron’s lifeless body, now slumped grotesquely against the blood-spattered rocks. She turned back to Jaime, her eyes flicked to the ragged gash on his side, then flicked back up to catch his gaze. Neither spoke.

The silence was broken by another excruciating shriek of the rampaging dragon, followed by the shouting of men approaching in the distance. 

They helped each other tumble into the boat Davos had secured for them as promised, then, not without immense effort, managed to push themselves out into the tide. Groaning in pain, Jaime slumped down onto the bottom of the boat. Davos had hidden some food, supplies, and clothing in the boat, courtesy of Tyrion. He pressed one of the shirts onto the wound on his side to stanch the bleeding. Beyond exhaustion now, and dizzy from blood loss, he laid his head on Cersei’s lap. Reflexively, she reached out to run her fingers through the ashy locks of his hair. 

After a time, Cersei said, quietly and slowly, “I sent to have you killed, you know.”

“I know.” His eyes remained closed.

“And yet, you came back to me.”

“I know.”

And with that, he promptly fell fast asleep.

***

The moon was glowing brightly in the sky when their boat washed up onto shore. The gentle jolt and grinding of sand startled Cersei awake. She had also nodded off sometime in the night, despite her best efforts to remain alert. Jamie, still asleep, hadn’t stirred.

She peered down at his exposed side. His bloody linens looked black and sticky in the moonlight. It was an alarming amount of blood. Yet his expression was serene, his breaths slow, and deep, no longer shallow and labored. She hoped this meant the bleeding had subsided, not that he was growing closer and closer to death. Moving to readjust herself, she gasped sharply as waves of pain seared through her cramped muscles.

Jaime started awake, making swirling disoriented motions with his arms that almost toppled the boat until he remembered where they were, and steadied himself.

“I suppose we’re here,” he groaned, shifting his weight to stand. They would simply have to wait until morning to find out where _here_ was.

***

In a fortuitous turn of events, their boat had washed up near the mouth of the Wendwater river, in close proximity to where it emptied into Blackwater Bay, and only a short walk from the modest village at Wendmouth.

The sun began to rise into the sky, warming the sand where they had curled up in for the night. Jaime awoke first. He brought himself into a sitting position, shaking his head and scraping the sand out of his hair. The wound in his side, while still agonizingly sore and not yet beyond risk of infection, had, at least, clotted over, and stopped bleeding. 

Cersei stirred and Jaime turned to her. She turned toward him and smiled gently, then grimaced in pain as her tired muscles contracted.

He leaned down to kiss her forehead, and then said, “I can see ships and houses in the distance, not too far from here. If we can make it there, we can find a place to eat and to sleep.”

Among the food and clothing in the boat, Tyrion had apparently instructed Davos to leave a respectable sum of coin for his siblings to survive on once they had escaped King’s Landing. They had enough to get by for a few months, assuming that they could keep their identities hidden.

They undressed, washed the blood and sand off their bodies, buried their clothes--and, with no little remorse, Jaime’s golden hand--then draped themselves in the simple garments they’d been given. Tyrion had done well; as long as they didn’t behave suspiciously, they wouldn’t attract any scrutiny based on their appearance alone. Hand in hand, carefully supporting each other’s steps, they began to walk towards the town.

***

It wasn’t enormously difficult to secure a place to stay. Right off the shore, a tavern advertised itself with a garish looking wooden sign.

“Welcome!” the tavern-keeper shouted gregariously as they entered the room. “What can I help yeh with? A good meal and a bath, from the looks of it!” He smiled good-naturedly.

“Uh,” Jaime started, “The sign behind you, it mentions rooms? Do you have any rooms available? For us?”

The tavern-keeper raised an eyebrow, and Jaime belatedly remembered that most travellers who looked as rough as they did likely weren’t able to read. “I might,” the barman replied carefully. “What are you two doing here in Wendmouth?”

Jaime opened his mouth but found he had no idea what to say; thankfully, Cersei was better at thinking on her feet.

“We fled King’s Landing ahead of the dragon queen,” she said simply. “Did you not see all the ships making the Blackwater approach?”

The barman grunted. “We did,” he said, chewing slowly on his words, “But you’re the only two that’ve come ‘round here to hide. Why’s that, would yeh say?”

Cersei gave a pointed glance down at her pregnant stomach, much more obvious in peasant clothes than it had been in the fine gown they had buried on the beach. “We didn’t want to be anywhere near there with a child on the way. Now if you have a room, we have coin.”

Jaime reached into his pocket and placed a short stack of coins on the bar. “We won’t be any trouble,” he said.

The gold clinked in the tavern-keeper’s pocket as the pair made their way to their room.

***

Weeks passed.

Life was unbearable.

Unaccustomed to being holed up in a stuffy room, neither found the adjustment easy. Already they were tired of eating the same plain meals of bread and unseasoned chicken every night, of the scratchy linens and raucous laughter from the tavern’s nightly visitors. Sometimes Cersei would cry inconsolably, and Jaime would wrap his arms around her and hush, “Quiet, quiet now,” until she fell asleep. He would lie awake in bed at night, trying to figure out how to build a future from this. 

The money supply from their brother would not last much longer, and it became more and more pressing that they find a source of income. The issue at hand, they decided, was that everything Jaime could do to support them would certainly draw attention. He could read, write, do sums and ledger-keeping, but how many retired common-born sellswords--and that was certainly how Jaime presented himself in the few short conversations he’d had with the barman--had the benefit of a Lannister education? Cersei of course had had the same tutors, but even fewer camp followers were literate.

“We need to do something, Jaime. It won’t be long before our baby is here. I can’t stay shut in here any longer. It is maddening.” 

“What would you have me do?” he snapped, his irritation heightened because he knew she was right. He was miserable, too, his frustration compounded by the reality of his uselessness as a cripple.

“The money our wretched little brother left us is not going to last. We ha--” 

“That ‘wretched little brother’ is the reason you’re not dead right now,” Jamie stopped her. “And to be honest, I wish he were here with us right now to help us come up with a plan!” He paused and thought about what he had just said. “Maybe that’s it.” he considered. His brother, the imp, also useless as a soldier or a blacksmith, or in any other skillset that required the strength that he himself had embodied until he’d lost his hand. “What _would_ Tyrion do?” 

Cersei snorted. “Tyrion would be down at the tavern drinking himself into a stupor, plotting new ways to betray us.” 

“Come now Cersei, our brother, he…” and he trailed off. “No, you’re absolutely right. That is _exactly_ what he would do. And it’s exactly what I’ll do.”

“You can’t be serious, surely?” She narrowed her eyes and watched him as he crossed the room to his boots, and struggled to put them on with one hand.

“Unless you have any better ideas, it sounds like a damn fine one to me,” he muttered, becoming visibly angry with how difficult a task putting his own shoes had become. She opened her mouth to protest, but stopped the words in her throat. She saw the pain and desperation in his eyes right then, whether he admitted it to her or not.

It wasn’t about the shoes, and it wasn’t about the tavern. He wasn’t having an easy time of it all either, and she could not deny that the Jaime now was not the same Jaime as he was when he could fight. He had come back to her and their child, and she loved him for that, but he had yet to come back to himself. Her mood softened. 

“Here.” She slid off the bed and onto the floor at his feet, taking the boot from his hands and positioning it below his foot. “Just don’t go telling his stupid joke about the donkey and the honeycomb. It’s not nearly as clever as he thinks it is.”

***

Night had fallen and the tavern was bursting at the seams with activity. A group of fishermen commandeered a large bench, singing and clanking their horns and wooden cups as they swayed drunkenly to their own gruff voices. Traders and boatmen crowded at the bar around Jaime, who was feeling the effects of the ale more quickly than he was used to.

No one seemed to pay him any mind, which was good of course, but a part of him wanted to strike up a conversation, any conversation at all. Outside of Cersei, the barkeeps, and the necessary transactional conversation here and there, their situation largely isolated him from any sort of social contact outside their room. He swilled another pull of ale around his mouth before gulping it down. “What would Tyrion do?” he asked himself again under his breath.

Then the tavern door banged open, and Jaime froze when he saw who walked in.

A man stood in the entryway, looking around the scene in the room. Jaime squinted, trying to combat the wavy trails the alcohol was casting over his vision. Could it be? The man finished surveying the room and approached the barkeep. There was no question. It was Podrick Payne.

Quickly, Jaime turned his body back towards his drink and slouched his shoulders. Podrick, here, and not in Winterfell? What on earth was he doing in a place like this? His mind swirled, trying to focus through the drunkenness. “If I run, he might notice. If I don’t, he might see me. Maybe if I crouch down I can slip away, or I could--” 

“Hello!” Podrick said brightly. While Jaime had debated, the boy had spotted him and walked over to stand at his side. Jaime looked away and pulled his cloak over his head, too drunk to keep up with the fact that it was already too late. “I was hoping to find you here, Ser Ja--”

Jaime swiveled around and growled over Podrick, “Be quiet! Someone might hear you.” He looked around the room, scanning for a quieter spot. “Follow me.” 

They moved to a table out of earshot of most of the room. Luckily, Jaime thought, the patrons were too busy celebrating tonight to care about eavesdropping. “What are you doing here, Podrick?” he asked, not sure he was ready to hear the answer. He thought of Cersei, defenseless in their room.

“So you do remember me! I knew--”

“Podrick! I need to know.”

Taken aback briefly, Pod’s face grew serious. “Why, I was sent here to find you. _Both_ of you,” he said meaningfully.

Jaime lowered his head, glanced around the room to ensure no one had started listening in, and hissed, “_Who_ sent you? The dragon queen?” 

“Of course not, she’s dead.” He stared at Pod blankly. “Didn’t you know? She died at King’s Landing.” 

Jaime contemplated this, the shock of this situation forcing sobriety back into his head. He admitted, “I haven’t been keeping up with the gossip around here, on account of _not wanting to be found_.” He stared at Podrick expectantly, still not satisfied with his explanation. “Well then?” 

“Your brother sent me, and the King. The King helped us to find you. Told me you two were staying here.” 

“King?” Jaime questioned. “What king?”

“Well Bran of course, of House Stark. You hadn’t even heard _that?_ Why do you think all the men here are so pleased with themselves?”

Jaime _had_ been wondering that, actually, but had quickly got too drunk to ask about it.

Upstairs, a blood-curdling scream cut through the low roar of the tavern. Moments later a woman came running down the stairs and stopped to yell “Midwife! We need a midwife!”

Jaime and Podrick looked at one another, then bolted for the stairs.

***

Tyrion leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk. It had been a few days since he’d sent Pod to make contact with his siblings, shouldn’t he have been back by now? Unfortunately there was no Maester in Wendmouth, which meant no ravens, so he had no choice but to sit back and wait. 

Almost on cue, a very dusty and disheveled Ser Podrick threw open the doors to Tyrion’s makeshift office. Extensive damage had been done to the castle, but Tyrion needed “A place to eat and a place to drink and a place to read, alone,” and he had made it happen. 

“Apologies, my lord,” he said, trying to catch his breath, “but you said to come see you as soon as I got back.”

“Of course, come in, come in.” Tyrion motioned for him to come forward, and began pouring him a drink. 

“I found them, my lord, right where the king said they would be.”

“Excellent,” he replied, “Bran’s abilities can be so useful when applied. What did you learn? Why haven’t they gone to Pentos?” he asked, more eagerly than he intended to let on.

“They’re both alive, and they’ve managed to avoid being identified. They haven’t had enough coin to leave Wendmouth, on account of Ser Jaime being unable to find work. He was injured badly the day King’s Landing fell.” Tyrion’s eyes widened. “But he’s alright now, mostly recovered.”

Tyrion gave a small sigh of relief, before processing the rest of what Pod had said. “What do you mean, not enough coin? He should have sold his hand for a small fortune. I thought that much was obvious!” 

“I do not know my lord, but he was not wearing it when I saw him.”

“Well no matter,” Tyrion dismissed, reaching to refill his drink. “Wendmouth is a good enough place for them.”

“There’s a customs house there, I strongly suggested that it was the king’s orders that they employ a retired sellsword next time he came to call.”

“You’re brilling, ser Podrick!” Podrick beamed. “And, the babe?”

Podrick grinned and said proudly, “Born the night before yesterday.”

“So soon?” 

“Yes, well, the midwife pronounced them both in good health. I was there, myself!” 

Tyrion sighed, realizing he’d been holding his breath. “What was it?”

“A girl.” Pod smiled. “They’ve named her Joanna.”


End file.
